October 21, 2006

Book Thoughts: The Blind Side

I'm not interested in football, at all. I've never been able to sit through an entire football game, I can't name a dozen football players, and I have a football fantasy team that I forgot to pre-rank players for before the draft and now I'm that horrible owner who never checks his team.

The Blind Side is about a poor African-American kid in Memphis who somehow ends up at a Christian school where he's taken in by a rich white family. And he happens to be six and a half feet tall, over 300 pounds, but also enormously, unusually, freakishly athletic and quick and agile for someone with that frame, and he ends up a college football recruit despite a real lack of education and a high school GPA hovering between 0 and 1. If you think too hard, you can read this book as the story of how a kid won the lottery because he happened to be genetically blessed to play football, and instead of ending up on the street, he gets this fairy tale life, not because he worked hard or deserved it but because he's enormous and quick, and can make a lot of people a lot of money. But if you don't think too hard, you can read it as the story of a generous family that takes in a kid with no options, and helps him change his life and become a football player with a future instead of a neglected kid on the streets, with no future at all. The truth is probably somewhere in between. The family that took him in comes off well-intentioned. It's impossible to save everyone. They changed a kid's life. They saved one kid. So what if he happens to be the next great offensive lineman, that doesn't make what they did any less of an act. In any case, the book is a great read, even if you find yourself skimming the 30% that's about Joe Montana and Lawrence Taylor and the transformation of the left tackle into the highest-paid position on the field. Michael Lewis can tell a story.